14 sep. 2008

“We are all Georgians!” cried McCain and now we have the soon-to-be-his-successor Sarah Palin, who thinks that Georgia got its name from the current President of the USA to honour him. Let’s be clear, Palin is the presidential hopeful of the Republicans, because McCain can’t even handle himself on the toilet anymore. What will she do?

What really happened?South Ossetia and Abkhazia, that part of Georgia what is mostly populated by Russians, does not want to be part of Georgia, just like the “great state” Alaska of Sarah Palin doesn’t want to be part of the USA. But when Georgia’s president wants to manage the question with force, Russia comes to help South Ossetia and that works very well, because the best of Georgia’s troopers were bound in Iraq by that time. So it could be wise for Sarah Palin to ask the help from Russia to make Alaska independent or at least loosen the cruel ties with the United States and its “damned peace of paper”, called the Constitution.But McCain has still not lost his consciousness so Sarah Palin has to slow down and while waiting she follows another scheme.

“NATO should extend membership to two former Soviet republics, and any Russian invasion of a NATO state could lead to a conflict with the U.S., Republican vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin told ABC News.However, the United States and Russia "cannot repeat the Cold War," the Alaska governor said in her first interview since becoming Sen. John McCain's running mate. […]Palin said she supported NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia -- a move Russia strongly opposes. She also said the United States must be "vigilant" about larger powers invading small democracies.

Not so sharp! She doesn’t know and how should she know, that the USA are not the only member of NATO. A good reason to keep Georgia out of NATO is what Sarah Palin stated, the thread of problems with Russia, about South Ossetia. Europeans want to clear those problems first along diplomacy manors and also Russia is not very eager to start a war with its best neighbour, client and supplier, the European Union.While it is unlikely to get arranged Georgia into NATO the neocons, more used to the matters of war than the rural christian conservative Palin, have readied their plans to make money with the case.Look at it: Having pulled back from Ossetia and Abkhazia, the Georgians can now regroup and re-equip. They are in desperate need of two things: weapons to kill tanks, and weapons to kill or deter aircraft and helicopters. We can supply both. The Stinger missile, the bane of Russian Frontal Aviation in Afghanistan, is still the most potent shoulder-fired weapon around. It will cause Russian close support aircraft to keep their distance, or to attack from higher altitude. Providing Georgia with medium-range surface-to-air missiles which can be deployed from Georgian territory proper will further push back their high-altitude aircraft (e.g., Tu-22M Backfires). Freed from aerial observation and the threat of air attack, Georgian forces could move dismounted over the mountains more readily than Russian mechanized forces can move along the roads. Which means that the Georgians would be free to set up ambushes to block further Russian advances and to interdict their lines of communication. We can provide the wherewithal for them to do this. First, we need to give the Georgians anti-tank mines, and not just any kind, but our latest "smart" off-route mines like the XM93 Wide Area Mine (WAM). These don't have to be placed directly on the roads, but can be put off to the side, where built-in sensors can detect armoured vehicles and launch explosive formed penetrator (RFP) warheads at them.Second, we need to give them our best anti-tank guided missile, the FGM-148 Javelin. This is a "fire and forget" weapon: once the operator lines up the target in his sights and locks on, he can fire the missile and get away, while the missile will fly autonomously to the target. With a range of about two kilometers, the Javelin also uses a "top attack" profile, diving down onto the roof of the tank where the armor is thinnest. In action in Operation Iraqi Freedom, javelins were devastating against Russian-designed tanks. Knocking out a few tanks or other armored vehicles on a narrow mountain road creates a barrier to movement behind which all traffic piles up, immobile and vulnerable to attack.Most of that traffic will consist of trucks and other "soft" vehicles. It's a waste to go after them with expensive missiles, but cheap mortars work pretty well. Even better would be long-range, highly accurate heavy sniper rifles, such as the 12.7mm (.50-caliber) Barrett, much favored by U.S. special forces. Georgian special forces are reputed to be well trained and highly motivated. They would probably be even more motivated fighting Russians on their own soil than they were fighting al Qaeda back in Iraq.Pretty soon, Russian forces will be taking serious casualties. They will have to inject more troops to protect their lines of communication. They will have to get out of their troop carriers and climb up into the mountains, where they will take more casualties from an agile and elusive enemy. They can't even resort to the time honoured tactic of butchering the local population of Ossetia and Abkhazia, since these are now "Russian citizens," having been granted passports by the Russian government (thereby doing Hitler one better: there actually were Germans in the Sudetenland, but Putin had to invent his downtrodden "Russian" minority in Georgia).As Russian forces start to bleed, it will be impossible, even in the controlled media of Putin's Russia, to hide the casualties from the Russian people. They will probably respond to this as they did to the bloodletting in both Afghanistan and Chechnya. Worse, for the Russian government, a prolonged and bloody war will require a massive increase in the Russian military budget, which has been run on a shoestring for most of the Putin era. That would mean making painful choices between the military and other priorities, precisely at the same time that oil prices have begun to come down, cutting into Russian revenues. In addition, the Russian military will begin to worry about the derailing of its abortive transformation plan: as the U.S. military recently discovered, you can fight a war, or you can transform yourself, but it's almost impossible to do both at once. Warfighting will eat into the already thin training, procurement, and research & development budgets, and soon the Russian staff will be howling, too.Source: “The Pain Game”

Yeah, good business and of course this will escalate and the EU will not come into fight.And then Sarah will think: “that damned Europeans, let’s join Russia, fight Europe and free Alaska!”Keep dreaming…